Journey With Us

Month: June 2015

It’s been four weeks in Singapore and every day has been its own adventure.

In 7 hours, HMCC of Singapore will be starting its annual !gnite missions conference from Saturday to Sunday.

In 2 days, we will be sending a missions team for a week of ministry in Singapore’s red light district.

Yes. Singapore has a red light district.

Since my first week in Singapore, I’ve been training with our missions team to learn more about what sex slavery looks like in Singapore, what the government is doing about, and soon we will find out what God is doing about it here. I’m SO excited to partner with a ministry called Tamar Village. They are committed to reaching, rescuing, and rehabilitating people who are caught in prostitution (on either side of the enslavement). This missions project will be a lot of learning, training, praying, and evangelizing to anyone God leads us to.

SO PLEASE PRAY FOR US. I’m keeping this entry short so that in the five extra minutes you would have spent reading this, you could spend it praying for us instead.

Here are 3 things we’d love prayer for!

For our church in Singapore to be !gnited with a passion for the mission God has given us to reach the lost

For a heart of readiness for our missions team. We haven’t had a lot of time to prepare and the nature of our mission requires us to be ready for anything at anytime. We want to be willing and available to do whatever God asks us to do – no matter how uncomfortable/scared/unqualified we may feel.

For God to open doors and hearts in Geylang (the red light district we will be going to)

Here’s a picture of our team! The team was joking that this is truly the most authentic “I need prayer” prayer card picture ever because two of us were super sick with a cold and a migraine when we took the picture.

It has been exactly one week since I (Diana) have arrived in Singapore. After countless goodbyes in the US, a beautiful wedding, and an unforgettable sendoff (with an epic video embedded below), I finally came to my new home in Singapore. Stepping into Singapore weather was like receiving a big hug from your oversized family member: sweaty and overwhelming

Acclimating to a new place inevitably has its ups and downs. Here’s a list of fail moments that PJoe and I are already laughing about. It would have been easy to clamor on and on about the amazingness of God’s splendor in the “little red dot”, but since the idea of this blog is to journey with us, I want God’s glory to shine through the reality of our everyday. And if this list causes any of you to worry more about us, good – pray harder for us then 😉

I broke the law.

You’re not allowed to eat/drink on the MRT. I completely forgot and started drinking out of my water bottle…directly in the face of an MRT supervisor. She was flabbergasted at my gall to so blatantly break the law in the face of law enforcement. All she could do was muster up a quick yell as I scurried away with water bottle in tow

I got heat stroke.

PJoe said he was going out for an easy jog. I thought it sounded like a good idea because he said it’d be, “AN EASY JOG”. Turns out it was the toughest workout ever and I almost vomited from the physical and heat exhaustion. To add to the excitement, all of this happened at 9am when our leaders’ training was scheduled to meet at our place at 10am. Praise God, I recovered in time. Any past missions team member that had to physically train under my husband, I am sorry.

I broke down at the supermarket

PJoe took me to our local supermarket to pick up some food. As I was walking down the aisle, I couldn’t recognize ANY of the vegetables. They were all long, green, with mysterious names. HOW MANY LONG GREEN VEGETABLES ARE THERE? I began to panic, wondering how in the world will I ever learn how to cook any of these vegetables. Will we starve? Will we have to eat out all the time? Will we die of high cholesterol because of all the eating out? Will we starve first because we went broke from the eating out first? Will we be dead, broke, and hungry? *insert panic here*

The list goes on of ridiculous moments in Singapore, and it’s only been 7 days.

All these ridiculous moments in a weird way have been a very humbling reminder that God can use absolutely anybody to do what He wants. Even a migraine prone, water guzzling, out of shape, culinary disaster like me.

In the midst of my mishaps, the best part of Singapore so far has been my church. It’s crazy how quickly I see the people I meet as MY church, MY family. Everyone has been so kind, welcoming, and humoring of my foreignness. I already told some of my church members about my breakdown at Sheng Shiong (the supermarket) to which they kindly offered to go with my next time since, as it turns out, PJoe also had no idea what any of those vegetables were. Please continue to pray for us and our church as we continue to plant our roots here in Singapore!

And for your media-viewing pleasure:

My first time with our church! One of our food-scientist (literally) members made us a wedding cake!

With our missional group, BTW (Beyond The Walls)

and behold, the most ridiculous tear/laugh inducing video that blessed me to the core: